Coyne: 147 years on, economic union still a dream

Unveiling the western premiers’ groundbreaking initiative for a “Canada Free Trade Zone,” Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall was momentarily overcome by a sense of national vision. “The proposal before us,” he said, “is to throw down all barriers between the provinces — to make a citizen of one, citizen of the whole.”

No, wait a minute. I’ve got my notes mixed up. That was George Brown, Father of Confederation — in 1865. If Wall was overcome by anything, it was rather by how little has been achieved since then. He noted the trade deal being negotiated with the European Union “would provide for open procurement with Canadian provinces even though we’re not providing each other with open procurement.”

No, indeed — nor mutual recognition of professional qualifications, nor harmonized regulatory standards, nor open agriculture markets, nor hundreds of other items, nearly a century and a half after Confederation, and 20 years after the last such groundbreaking initiative, the Agreement on Internal Trade, was supposed to have put an end to this nonsense. Let’s just say the premiers don’t have a great track record at these things.

But then, it has also been nearly seven years since the present federal government vowed, in that year’s Speech from the Throne, “to pursue the federal government’s rightful leadership in strengthening Canada’s economic union.” Which only makes the question more pertinent: Why is this being left to the provinces to negotiate, as if between sovereign states? If the provinces were the solution to this, we would not still be here.

I grant that the New West Partnership among the three western-most provinces is something closer to what a properly functioning economic union would look like, removing most impediments to the free flow of goods, services, capital and labour between them. But for pity’s sake, we are talking about a preferential trade agreement, inside of a single country. The provinces in question did not simply discard the various legal instruments with which they have protected their favourite local industries from competition, at the cost, not of other provinces, but of their own consumers and taxpayers, not to mention other industries.

Rather, they conceded these protections exclusively to one another, after much haggling, with all manner of exceptions — and shut out the other seven provinces altogether. It’s gracious of them, I suppose, to now invite the other provinces to join. It is also absurd. Self-respecting federations do not leave this sort of thing to inter-provincial negotiations, not only because it is unlikely to succeed, but because of what it implies.

It suggests that the provinces and their people do not belong to any enterprise larger than themselves, nor have any interests in common, but must rather view each other as hostile parties; that open trade between them is not the norm, the sort of thing you would naturally expect — as it would be, presumably, within each — but a matter of the most painstaking, limited and grudging concessions.

Leave aside that these aren’t concessions at all — that each province gains from removing its own trade barriers as much or more than it benefits the others, if it perceived its interests rightly. If, that is, a province were to put the consumer interest before producers, the public interest before the private, it would not need to negotiate such things with others. It would simply do so on its own.

I realize this is too much to ask. Experience gives us no reason to expect any better from the premiers: Making up new and costly ways to interfere with the proper functioning of the federation is what they do. The abdication of responsibility is Ottawa’s.

It was not only to create a “free trade zone,” after all, that the colonies agreed to federate all those years ago. It was to create a federal government. The delegates to the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences didn’t just agree to remove their trade barriers. They gave the federal government the authority to strike them down, via the Constitution’s “Trade and Commerce” power.

That is no more than how every other federation in the world handles it. It is in fact one of the signal advantages of a federation over a mere trade pact: an independent overseer, sovereign in its own right, with the legitimacy that democratic elections confer, can achieve a much higher degree of integration than any multilateral “dispute settlement process.” The Europeans understand this, which is why the Competition Commission of the European Union has been given similarly sweeping powers to strike down barriers to trade within the “Single Market.” The difference is that, in Europe, these powers are exercised, in a way no Canadian government would dare.

That includes this government, its early bravado long since faded. Of late the Industry Minister, James Moore, has been making noises about a renewed push to enforce the economic union. But it’s difficult to take him seriously. The western premiers could not have been more dismissive of Ottawa’s “rightful leadership” in this regard if they’d been Rene Lévèsque. That’s how steeped in provincialism, and provincial assumptions, we have become.

Which is really what this is all about. It isn’t only or even primarily a matter of economics. It is a matter of citizenship. So long as we leave this to the provinces to negotiate, or not — so long, that is, as it remains essentially voluntary, a matter for each province to decide — we are endorsing the idea that the people of Canada are not “citizens of the whole,” with a fundamental right to move about the country and to seek a livelihood as they choose, but must depend upon the grace and favour of whichever province they find themselves in.
Federations that take this right seriously do not make it an option. They make it mandatory, to be enforced by the only government answerable to “the whole,” to all of its people. Conversely, when we are unwilling to assign this authority to the federal government, what we are really saying is there is no such whole, that we are no more than the sum of our parts, and that we are not much closer to a common economic citizenship than we were in 1865.

A National Post original, Andrew Coyne's journalism career has also included positions with Maclean's, the Globe and Mail and the Southam newspaper chain. In addition, he has contributed to a wide range... read more of other publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Time and Saturday Night. Coyne is also a long-time member of the CBC’s popular At Issue panel on The National.View author's profile